A Close Reading of Pride and Prejudice

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In this video, Joe offers his interpretation of the passage you read in the previous step. Joe demonstrates how the reader gradually enters Elizabeth’s mind here, as the narrative subtly slips into the style known as free indirect discourse.

Free indirect discourse is a narrative style which is used for the representation of spoken words or thoughts. It typically appears in fictional prose when a character’s words or thoughts infiltrate the third-person narrative, so that the perspective shifts from that of the narrator to that of the character.

Crucially, the style is not explicitly announced, and the speech or thought is not directly attributed to the character. Instead the reader has to rely on a number of stylistic cues to determine whether the character’s point of view is present. These cues include:

- Exclamations and questions- Subjective or evaluative language which indicates the character’s opinion- Markers of space and time from the character’s perspective

Take for example the two sentences: ‘Elizabeth realised that she had put all her troubles behind her at last. She was happy now.’ In the first, the narrator reports Elizabeth’s realisation from an external perspective. In the second, on the other hand, the narrative enters into the character’s mind, as Elizabeth’s self-realisation is represented more directly. One sign of this is the use of the marker of present time, ‘now’; it is ‘now’ from Elizabeth’s perspective. Note though that this is still combined with the past tense ‘was’ and the third-person ‘she’; her actual thought at the time would have been something like ‘I am happy now.’ The combination of the usual features of narrative report, such as the third person and past tense, with signs of the character’s perspective, such as markers of the present tense, gives the style its mixed, ‘free indirect’ quality, and has led some critics to claim that they hear in the style two ‘voices’ simultaneously, or even a ‘dual voice’.

Sometimes in free indirect discourse there are no cues in the text suggesting the character’s point of view, and the style can appear indistinguishable from narrative report. In such cases the reader has to rely on the context of the surrounding sentences to determine whether or not the character’s perspective is present. The ambiguity of free indirect discourse is in fact one of its key features, and one of the reasons why it has been so popular in the history of the novel. Its subtle mixture of narrator and character allows writers to create a variety of effects, from empathy for the character when the two viewpoints seem to merge, to an ironic distance when it is possible to recognise some divergence between them. Both a character’s spoken words and his or her consciousness can be represented in free indirect discourse; the style is therefore often divided into free indirect speech and free indirect thought.

Though free indirect speech in particular can be found frequently in the 18th-century novel (and some have traced it to 17th-century prose and indeed even earlier), it is rare to find extended passages of free indirect thought in the English novel before the start of the 19th century, and the works of Jane Austen. In Austen’s later novels in particular, the consciousness of the heroine can be said to be portrayed almost continuously via free indirect thought, so that it is often very difficult to isolate passages of narrative which are unequivocally from an external point of view alone. It is this systematic, extensive use of the style which has led to Austen being justifiably credited with this important innovation in English literary history.